Like he's going to out-populist Romney. Romney has 4 homes. That makes him like 4 regular American homeowners!

Romney is his own populism. Take that!

Romney is a pure politician who doesn't scare me at all.

The thought of Paul Ryan anywhere near the White House, even as VP, is just unthinkable. I think I'd vote for Jerry Sandusky to keep Paul Ryan away.

In 2008, I got several Republicans to vote for Obama by reminding them that if McCain won, Palin would be a 72 year old man's heartbeat away from being President.

Having Mittens and Ryan on the same ticket is like a 2 for 1 in that sense.

Okay, fine. But at every point this year, Romney has had less of a chance of winning than McCain did at his worst point in 2008, and McCain never had a chance of winning. If you guys don't like Obama, why give him your vote? Vote for the third party that best represents your interests. It's your best option to show the Democratic party what you want them to represent. Voting for Obama is really a vote for two-party entrenchment, and that they only have to make you dislike the other guy more.

Hooker, because we on the left shouldn't divide up. Obama needs every vote he can get. It's not going to be the margin he won in 2008.

Instead of ditching the democrat party, why don't we hijack it like the tea party did with the GOP?

You're not going to see any change by supporting the incumbent system you hate. "We liberals shouldn't split up" is fear taking over your decision making.

Even in the worst case scenario of Romney winning (which he never will), and he flattens the tax rate considerably while enacting strict austerity measures that plunge the entire country into another severe recession: is propping up the two-party system that fails to make important changes to education, wartime responsibility, defense spending, and union support a better alternative?

I'm actually beginning to think that the GOP made a deal to purposefully lose this election so that they can prepare for a shot in the next one. Everything about this campaign screams that they know what people want to hear and they are going out of their way to alienate as many voters as possible.

I keep thinking about Rubio. He's way more popular than Ryan and could easily have won swing votes. I honestly think that Romney has been told to throw the game for the good of the team.

Bringing Ryan on the ticket essentially makes his economic policy the Republican policy - it's so extremely conservative('anti-government') that the media will frame 'centrist' policy firmly between democratic (centrist) policy and Ryan's plan. GOP has no intention or ideas for governing but they have succeeded in the past four years of driving the debate further and further to the right because... well, because the media wants them to, it seems.

Got a question for you third party fans. How do you expect to grow your plucky little third party from nothing to Unrivaled Master Of American Politics, without making the sort of backroom deals and taking the sort of strings-attached contributions that you so despise in the Democrats and Republicans?

Let's look at the Green Party. In some years they've got Ralph Nader as their candidate; read up on the sweatshop conditions he put his people through. So much for him being a champion of progressive values. This year, though, the Green candidate is Jill Stein, whose greatest accomplishment to date is getting herself arrested at a bank protest, like a college freshman at her very first protest. So either you go the way of Ralph Nader and become as bad as the people you're standing against, or you go the way of Jill Stein and remain completely ineffectual and achieve only symbolic (read: meaningless) victories. That's third parties for you.

Now the Democrats ... when their ranks aren't depleted, they do good work. Every major advance government has made in the past 100 years has been the work of Democrats. Their biggest problem is that they're still reeling from the Civil Rights Act, the biggest mistake the Democrats ever made (politically speaking anyway).

There have been many times I've been disappointed with Obama and with the Democrats, but disillusioned ... ? Not at all. They are doing the best they can with an obstructionist Republican Party that can block almost any legislation, and a support base with such a short attention span that they can't remember eight years of Bush coming up with absolutely ingenious ways to fuck over the country twice a week or more. At least the Democrats show up for work; in 2010, 59% of "Progressives" had better things to do on Election Day than show up and keep the Teabaggers out of office.

Willingly letting the country burn so you can make your point about not falling for a 2 party system like the rest of the sheeple kind of squarely puts you in the asshole conservative camp that cares more about principles than people.

People who support and vote for third parties are going out of their way to be useless.

Hooker : guessing you're trolling, but in case you're not the answer is simple. For the tiny percentage on the left they can get by shifting further to the left way, they can always get more by shifting to the right. A strong democratic mandate could make change, but the right is working hard to sow disillusionment because they know it hurts change.

Convincing the other side to throw their vote away is the first sign your party sucks.

I believe that the answer lies in a constitutional amendment that would absolutely forbid the transfer of money from any corporation to any campaign or politician, and that would require revolutionary change and demands on the part of the people.

America wouldn't "burn to the ground" in my _worst case scenario_; it would just continue to suffer at the same rate that it currently has for four years under Obama. I don't get the impression Obama is going to fix things any quicker or slower than Romney.

It's like some of you guys think voting for a third party means you want the third party candidate to be the President. It's not. The candidate for the Marijuana Party is not expecting to wind up President or operating under any such assumptions. It's to show whichever party you prefer that they can't just expect your vote because, despite constant complaining about your guy or girl being President for four years, you're just going to vote for them again based on the party they're running for regardless. If you live in a swing state, I can understand being hesitant to vote third party. If you live in a a blue state like New York or Washington, which haven't gone Republican since the Reagan landslides, why not give your vote more meaning?

Anyone who really thinks Obama and Romney are "the same" gets filed under "batshit crazy" in my book.

I meant to post this here not down there...

It would appear the economic think tanks on the Right are already coming up with an excuse to start stimulating via gov spending should Romney get elected. There's going to be plenty of spending, only "free market" (quotes to indicated that such a thing does not exist outside of economic theory) conservatives will do it much better.

http://neighborhoodeffects.mercatus.org/2012/08/10/does-stimul us-work/

With respect to the freshwater wonks at George Mason, they do include the pro-stimulus research in their citations. What they are saying is that it's a cold 50-50 divide among the anti-stimulus and pro-stimulus crowd. I honestly do not know enough about economics to say what the actual ratios are, but who cares? Just the fact that there's real debate here should be an indicator that maybe the GOP should no longer pretend to be something they're historically not.

Just the fact that Reagan was not only a military Keynesian but something of a normal cut and dry Keynesian as well during his recession should tell conservatives to put a sock in it and put America back to work.

Hooker, here's the problem with "Progressives", one of them anyway. They don't vote. They don't get involved. For all their bitching, they do nothing to make themselves a constituency worth courting.

Let's forget the 2010 election (where 59% of "Progressives" dropped the ball) and look at North Carolina's Amendment 1 vote a few months ago; Amendment 1 was the "fuck over LGBT citizens extra hard" amendment, it was an exercise in being shitty just to be shitty. The turnout rate among "Progressives" was about 33% or 34%, slightly lower than the conservative turnout.

Where the hell were "Progressives" that day? Can't blame this one on disappointment with Obama; this was a matter of "Progressives" deciding they had better things to do than stand up for their LGBT brothers and sisters.

Why should the Democrats even care about what "Progressives" think, when they won't vote in an election that speaks directly to their core values?

baleen, at certain points during the last five or six election cycles, the democrats have pretended to be financially leftist, yet have one major piece of litigation, the Affordable Care Act, to show for it. They are not going to expand government control over the economy, they are not going to prosecute the criminals leading banks, they are not going to do anything to stop the egregious abuses of the entire American economy that benefits the rich. There is a huge gap in rhetoric and record on both sides of the aisle.

But I agree with your main point; the Gop pretends to be a lot more strident and black and white about their economic policy and beliefs, saying they will cut funding to PBS while continuing to throw trillions at wars and at corporate welfare. Republicans are unquestionably responsible for the huge deficits that they rail so lustily against. When you turn up the rhetoric, its natural to assume you would turn down the hypocrisy, but their adherents are so misinformed and gullible they can get away with it.

Hooker and other third party types are basically the True Forced Loneliness of politics, proudly announcing that they're quitting in order to cover up their own unwillingness to get off their asses and try to improve things. Their brave stand of quitting will get those awful women to change their ways and come crawling back someday. SOMEDAY!

I've come to realize that it's not Obama who makes both parties look exactly the same.

It's you guys.

American Jobs Act was decisively pro-Union and a very leftist piece of legislation.

At the heart of the issue here is that the Democratic Party is an extremely pluralistic party, with around 15-25% (depending on where you're polling) of registered Dems identifying as "conservative." Think about what that must mean for policy makers!

By comparison, the amount of Republicans identifying as liberal, and there used to be millions of them, have dwindled into the nether.

The GOP now hopes to disenfranchise the power blocks of the Democratic Party; the majority of minority voters, unions, the Northeast and Western entrenched base, and lure away those giant blocks of Democratic moderates and conservatives. They've become a completely regional party, and they know it, hence the suppression of early voter laws and spacing out voting booths in black neighborhoods in GOP controlled states by several miles, in some cases, like in Ohio, blacks have to travel 10 miles to vote.

That's the price you have to pay for ideological purity.

He's dead, and his body is rotting at the bottom of the well and making everyone else sick.

People say that 9/11 was the best thing that ever happened to the Republicans, but that's simply not true: the Civil Rights Act was. That's where the Republicans picked up their true constituency -- bigots -- and the Democrats have been operating with depleted numbers ever since.

You'd have to be human garbage to watch this clip and hate Obama, but that's where maybe a quarter to a third of our country is.

You've got a point. There's no denying that the GOP will make this election a black and white issue.

WILL make it?

Come on now.

Five for "Keep Calm and Reptile On."

American citizens are dangerous, crazy, desperate gun lovers. Some of 'em are dangerous motherfuckers who threaten hundreds or thousands of lives.

Says who

Shut up, misterbuns.

Just shut up.

I've never understood how this matters to people. A man in another country is (as far as our sources indicate) working with a terrorist group, the United States is about to launch some sort of strike ... oh wait, turns out he's an American citizen, so we should do what? Fly a squad car over to the Middle East with a couple police officers and a bullhorn?

I am exactly as troubled by killing American citizens as I am by killing non-citizens.

bort i sincerely wish there was some clever comment that i could make that would make you have some sort of ideological transformation into someone who isn't super duper wrong about everything but i guess there's probably not one. maybe you could bookmark this page and then come back in 5 years and use it as a barometer of intellectual growth? i don't know man but i'm rooting for you.

Okay, CJH, you got me. The police don't already have the power to shoot me if the circumstances seem to warrant it. And when it comes to dealing with terrorists, the overriding concern shouldn't be whether they pose a threat to the United States, the overriding concern should be determining the country they were born in.

You haven't thought this through at all, have you?

Bort, you're a terrible person, and in no way representational of any kind of American ideology right of a Texas jury. You constantly hate on the Civil Rights Act as bad for your party, and now you're cool with rule of law only being for Americans you agree with.

Typical right-wing Democrat, and why the party is bullshit.

What the fuck? I'm pretty sure his points on the Civil Rights Act was to just show the true roots of Republican resurgence: bigotry. In political reality (not perfect shining snowflake third party fantasy politics), yes that is what allowed the long dead Republican party to make a comeback. How can that even be disputed?

And why should the citizenship of a suspected terrorist matter? Arguing that it does says you value American lives over others.

Ignoring rule of law? Jesus christ, people.

FABIO: thanks for spelling out the obvious to people who I know can read better than that. I make that point about the Civil Rights Act because I don't know any other way to be sufficiently emphatic about how the Republicans' fortunes stem directly from it. Everything that's happened in American politics since then -- EVERYTHING -- has been shaped by the Republican Party being a haven for bigots, and the Democrats no longer being able to dominate Congress.

This has made it real easy for the Republicans to pass anything they want to pass; their voter base will support pretty much anything so long as it is phrased as: "do you support _______ or are you some sort of nigger lover?" You know why the Republicans have been so successful at demonizing government, public sector jobs, unions, and welfare? Because they've attached a black face to each of them.

Actually the feeling at the time was more like "These two guys are for and against the exact same things, it doesn't really matter who we vote for." Ever seen that John Jackson vs. Jack Johnson scene from Futurama? It was like that during Bush v. Gore in 2000.

Now we know how stark a difference it was, but remember, this is before Gore won his Nobel Peace Prize, before 9/11 and 12 years of war in Afghanistan, before Gitmo, iPhones, twitter, even before the 24-hour news cycle. There were cable news channels but they reported more actual news than they do now. Headline News actually did just show a repeating tape that talked about the biggest headlines of the day, without a lot of commentary. The economy appeared to be still booming and we had just had 8 very fruitful years with Clinton, and I think a lot of people convinced themselves that it doesn't really matter who the president was.

I get the feeling Gore didn't really want to be president anyway. He was pretty unenthusiastic during first part of the campaign, didn't have a solid platform anyone could grab onto, was criticized for changing his positions and manner to pander to audiences, and was pretty much like John Kerry 2004 but without a Big Bad Bush to run against. Voters generally didn't know anything about GWB except that he was George Bush Sr.'s son, and even some people didn't know that. Nationally, we didn't learn just how big a moron GWB was until he was President. Also GWB famously said during the 2000 campaign that the US shouldn't be in the business of nation-building.

Phantom stars, Screwtape.

I can even make a case that Clinton was as bad or worse than the first Bush in some ways, so I can understand where people were coming from in 2000. But since then we have seen the Republican Party descend into a rabid beast that needs to be put down.

The first duty of any decent citizen on election day is to keep Republicans out of office. Once Republicans cease being a threat, we can work on improving the Democrats, though really, just putting more Democrats into power will inherently improve things significantly.

The more things change...

The wistful 90s when the Republicans had such rabid moderates like Newt Gingrich, Ralph Reed, Pat Buchanan, Pete Wilson, etc. etc. A time when a 4-year-old Fox news had not yet been corrupted by right-wingery and congress wasn't in the business of playing petty games like impeachment over a lie about a blowjob.

Zompus, how old are you? The 24-hour news cycle could be said to have started in the 1980's, when CNN was founded, but it was happening LOOOONG before the year 2000. Many peg its genesis to the first Gulf War when 24-hour coverage of the hostilities ramped up the attention payed to 24/7 news coverage, especially on CNN.

I remember a major editorial calling the 2000 election the most inconsequential election of the last century or so. Man that was funny in retrospect.

In the 1990s, there were still Republicans who understood the importance of bipartisan efforts and putting the country (almost) first. Newt and company were regarded as hot-headed newcomers to the House, while the Senate remained the more sensible body and was capable of functioning even with a 50/50 split. In the time since then, Newt's gang have graduated to taking over the Senate and filibustering out of malice, we've got Michelle Bachmann types who are genuinely crazy the way Newt only pretends to be, and even Pat Buchanan is appalled by what the Republicans have become.

...people had more jobs back then.

People will be questioning whether a man who made a fortune in outsourcing will protect their jobs from going overseas. Even Republicans will be asking that question, and they haven't used their brains that much to delve deep into why anyone does anything in decades.

It would appear the economic think tanks on the Right are already coming up with an excuse to start stimulating via gov spending should Romney get elected. There's going to be plenty of spending, only "free market" (quotes to indicated that such a thing does not exist outside of economic theory) conservatives will do it much better.

http://neighborhoodeffects.mercatus.org/2012/08/10/does-stimul us-work/

With respect to the freshwater wonks at George Mason, they do include the pro-stimulus research in their citations. What they are saying is that it's a cold 50-50 divide among the anti-stimulus and pro-stimulus crowd. I honestly do not know enough about economics to say what the actual ratios are, but who cares? Just the fact that there's real debate here should be an indicator that maybe the GOP should no longer pretend to be something they're historically not.

Just the fact that Reagan was not only a military Keynesian but something of a normal cut and dry Keynesian as well during his recession should tell conservatives to put a sock in it and put America back to work.

The Cult Of Failure is alive and well. The only true God is the satisfying crunch of knowing somebody you harbor a grudge against in a tribal fashion is suffering. Damn their eyes and their hateful hearts.

They're responding to their sense of disappointment, not to any sober or halfway unbiased view of policies. Obama is more disappointing than Bush because they loved hating Bush, but they assumed Obama would hand-deliver each of them their very own unicorn.

Your coworkers are ObamaGirl but without the gravitas.

If you work at a medical marijuana dispensary, your coworkers are correct.

Or if they're government whistle blowers. Or if they're undocumented immigrants.

Otherwise, some issues he's been as bad as Bush, some issues he's been better. But on just a few has he been worse.

If you say the same thing over & over, it loses its power. Even if its true. So.. no he shouldn't have been saying this all along.

Anaxagoras has not been paying attention to the last 20 years of conservative PR.

Fuck it, THIRTY years.